Sex in the Title (15 page)

“Look, it didn’t help that she kept stumbling across porn when she came over. And maybe all of that porn is what makes me check out other women so much! It gets me all horny,” Evan replied.

“Evan, did you ever consider that you were just born horny? I can’t believe the kind of bullshit you try to feed me. You should really look into farming. Or lawyering. But not computer programming.”

*****

Evan ultimately decided against being Narc’s roommate beyond their first year of college. Despite their various differences, however, the two remained close friends throughout college, as both wingmen and basketball partners.

Towards the end of their senior year in college, Narc trounced Evan on the basketball court in the final and heavily wagered match of their “nine-game, one-on-one playoffs.” The two left the outdoor court, toweling off their sweat and catching their breath. Narc continued dribbling the ball as they headed home.

“You know in college you’ve had an unfair advantage, since you were on the team,” Evan began, explaining his three-six defeat. “But I really see this is as an ongoing competition. Like with any top team. You don’t just look at one season. You look at their performance over many seasons.”

“Are you trying to challenge me even as you lick your wounds?” Narc asked.

“I’m just saying that next year, when you’re studying your ass off at Columbia Law School, you’re going to be badly out of practice. Whereas I’ll be improving my game every weekend. So then we’ll see what’s what.”

“Aight. You on, mo fo’,” Narc said, breaking into an elaborate dribble routine, as if to accept the challenge with all the more bravado. But just as he began, he caught a glimpse of a college student in a white tennis skirt, with a racket slung over her back, riding past them on a bicycle. Narc lost control of the ball, which bounced off in another direction. The two friends stopped, frozen in their tracks.

“Did you see that?” Evan asked, in a daze.

“In-fuckin-credible,” Narc replied.

Once they recovered enough to resume their walk, Narc ran over and picked up the stray ball. He began dribbling it again, slowly. As they continued their walk, a hypothetical problem occurred to Evan that required some consultation with Narc.

“Now I know this is a sensitive topic with you,” he began, “but if you had to choose between chasing tail and chasing balls, which would you take?”

“You can’t prejudice the question by phrasing it in a homosexual way like that: tail versus balls. You gotta ask it as tail versus hoops.”

“OK. Fine. Tail versus hoops. Like if that girl on the bike were with you on sports Sunday and she wanted to get it on, but you had the Nets playing the Knicks, what would you do?”

“That’s a really tough question…You’re saying that there’s no way that she’ll wait a few hours?”

“She wants to get it on right now. I mean, she’s hot and horny and ready to go, and if she has to wait a few hours, she’ll be looking elsewhere…”

“That’s a really fucked up situation.”

“But you have a VCR. You could always record the game and watch it afterwards.”

“Now why isn’t there a VCR trick like that with women? Why can’t we just record that horny state of mind and play it after the game?”

“That would be nice. But the reality is that it’s now or never with this babe.”

“But you know that watching the game just isn’t the same if it ain’t live...”

Evan refused to modify the hypothetical.

“I can’t watch no recorded Net-Knicks game, yo! That’s just not right. I gotta be there when it’s happening. You can’t be askin’ me unfair questions like that, bro…What would you do?”

“I’m not like you when it comes to this question.”

“Are you saying that you would rather go for the babe and watch a taped version of the game later?” Narc asked, in disbelief.

“I wouldn’t hesitate for a second. Tail trumps everything else for me. Even hoops.”

“I’m not saying it’s not a really close fuckin’ call. I’m just illin’ about the fact that there has to be this conflict…I mean, what about some kinda compromise solution?”

“Like what?”

“Like she blows me while I watch the game.”

“I guess that could work,” Evan replied reflectively, as if he hadn’t thought about the possibility.

They walked for a moment in silence, which gave Evan the opportunity to consider the compromise solution some more.

“But she’d probably want more afterwards,” he said, suddenly breaking the silence.

“Well that would have to wait.”

“I think you might lose her then. She could get really pissed off about that scenario.”

“Evan, I don’t like these impossible dilemmas you come up with. There just aren’t really any acceptable answers to them. Women just need to understand that some things are sacred and not to be disturbed.”

“You’re crazy, Narc. It really is a shame that you’re not in the NBA.”

“Why do you think I dream about it all the time? It’s not just that those guys get whatever smokin’ hot ladies they want. They also get smokin’ hot ladies who will watch the NBA games with them, and have even more respect for those games than the players do.”

“And those guys make serious coin.”

“And they don’t have to sit through no three fuckin’ years of law school. They got the life. No question.”

“Do you think anyone has a better scorecard than the NBA stars?”

“Porn stars.”

“You and your crazy porn star fantasies,” Evan said, shaking his head in amused disapproval.

“There are no male Asian-American porn stars out there,” Narc noted. “I could be the first…”

“So why don’t you do that, instead of law school?” Evan dared.

“If I knew for sure that my family would never find out, I might actually have the balls to go for it. But I can’t. It’s juris doctor time for this Wang. Gotta represent the family, yo.”

Chapter 10
Trevor

Throughout his three dismal years at Columbia Law School, Narc struggled with the temptation to drop out and pursue the unconventional careers linked to his two recurring fantasies: trying out for the NBA and becoming a porn star. The only force that kept Narc in graduate school until commencement was his familial superego: his parents would absolutely delight in his graduation, and they would suffer epic, multi-generational shame if he, instead, become a failed NBA wannabe, or – even worse – a porn star.

Narc felt very out of place in law school, even though he performed well in his classes and had at least one thing in common with most of his classmates: he was there because he didn’t know what else to do with his life. During orientation, when everyone appeared to hail from diverse life experiences with varied perspectives and goals, Narc thought he might actually befriend some interesting people. But within the first two months, virtually all of his classmates transformed into obsessive-compulsive competitors who brownnosed even the most despised professors in hopes of better grades or recommendations. Classmates who once seemed so intriguingly different began sounding tediously similar. His fellow students were now interested in discussing only the facts and holdings of legal cases, the legal doctrines likely to be tested during finals, the law professors revered or hated, the law firms recruiting on campus, the smart or dumb things said by other law students, and the various opportunities – like the law review and Moot Court competitions – to improve one’s standing in the class hierarchy. Despite all of the frenzied peer pressure from high school-style cliques, Narc just couldn’t get himself to care about the law school experience, or any of the people sharing it with him. He was there just to please his parents, collect his diploma, and move on.

Consequently, Narc spent as little time as possible among his classmates, and rarely attended classes after his first semester. He found much greater satisfaction volunteering as a tutor and older brother to underprivileged youth in the neighboring Harlem area. He also spent three days out of every week going back to New Jersey to help his parents with their laundry business, chip in with household chores, and offer whatever big brother help his younger sisters needed.

Contrary to Evan’s bold predictions, Narc’s basketball game actually improved during his time in law school, since Narc never let school pressures interfere with regular practice. It was also on the basketball court where Narc met Trevor Bediako, his only close friend from law school and a formidable hoops rival.

Trevor, like Narc, was not particularly fond of law school or most of the people he met there, but stayed happy with the help of basketball and the Manhattan nightlife. Those shared pleasures – in the stiflingly narrow and conservative law school environment – were enough to bond the two men, despite their considerable differences.

At six feet seven inches, Trevor was a human skyscraper. Narc enviously nicknamed him “Tower.” Trevor’s dark African complexion, handsome physiognomy, English accent, and immense stature gave him an almost mesmerizing presence, despite his soft-spoken style.

Born in London to parents who had emigrated from Ghana, Trevor was raised with a European mentality and a simultaneous admiration for and suspicion of American culture. Even in the heat of a basketball game, Trevor spoke like a British aristocrat, with flawless grammar and articulation, true to his undergraduate education in history at Oxford. He was marked by gentlemanly mannerisms, reserved speech, and – by comparison to Narc – Puritan sexual mores. Trevor’s impeccable grooming always included perfectly cut nails, three sprays of cologne, meticulously removed facial and scalp hair, and exceptionally neat and stylish attire. His shiny clean scalp accentuated his handsome looks and the strong, symmetrical shape of his head.

Trevor’s parents had spent ten years slowly building what would become a lucrative family business, importing fine crafts, rare masks, and high-end paintings from Africa. Their financial success enabled them to give their three children a refined upbringing that was far more privileged and comfortable than any they had ever enjoyed. Their humble beginnings, however, ensured that Trevor and his younger brother and sister were each made to earn any spending money from the age of ten, and were all regularly reminded of the multitudes living in far less fortunate circumstances.

Despite his polite and gentle graces, Trevor secretly loathed the superficiality often required by his polished upbringing. His favorite shirt for working out or playing ball said simply, “Boycott small talk.” Indeed, making meaningless chitchat was, for Trevor, the most indigestible ingredient of the urbane character he was raised to have. Narc discovered this fact about his friend when Trevor announced one day that he was never going to go on another blind date.

“Was she nasty-lookin’?” Narc ventured.

“No. She was actually a fairly fit bird,” Trevor replied. “But we had absolutely nothing in common. So we were forced to sit there, over a two-hour dinner, pretending to be interested in each other so that the people who set us up with the best of intentions wouldn’t feel slighted. And there’s nothing more torturous for me than having to make small talk for two hours.”

“Couldn’t you just talk about yourself for two hours?”

“The only thing more tiresomely banal on a first date than exchanging polite niceties is recapitulating the essential facts of my life, with which I am already far too familiar and which I find utterly boring to recount, after so many years of repeating the story.”

“What about current events? Couldn’t you talk about the news or something?”

“That’s just the problem. Politeness requires avoiding any topic that people actually care about, such as politics and religion, unless of course the two people are of like minds on the religious or political issue at hand.”

“Well, were you?”

“Not at all. She comes from a family of radical communists who vehemently deny God’s existence, so there was no way to discuss politics or religion without spoiling the pleasant dinner ambiance.”

“What about pop culture?”

“We have completely different tastes. She fancies folk music and everything else that came out of the sixties and seventies. And she thinks of hip-hop only as a form of social protest rather than an important innovation in music. She even suggested that I enjoy classical music only because I was raised as a member of the bourgeois.”

“What about the weather?”

“That’s what we were left with for eighty percent of the dinner. Do you have any idea how bloody painful it is for me to spend even a second comparing the climate of New York with that of London?”

“But the weather is the greatest topic out there, yo!”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Can you find any other topic that affects everyone, that everyone can relate to, and that everyone has something to say about?” Narc persisted, more out of amusement than conviction.

“The weather doesn’t affect me in any way that is significant enough to justify the breath involved in speaking about it. I find it difficult to relate to people who enjoy discussing the utterly uninteresting and unchangeable facts of life. And I have absolutely nothing to say about those facts,” Trevor replied urgently, as if he were finally given the chance to correct a tragic mistake being committed every day all over the world.

Narc generally saw Trevor as an assemblage of oddly comical contradictions. Trevor liked hip-hop music, but always felt uncomfortable repeating the often racy lyrics. He appreciated the esthetics of women but would never get graphic in describing what precisely he admired about a particular female. Trevor relished the challenge of trying to attract a woman’s attention, but – unlike Narc – he always seemed too shy or dignified to make the first move. And while Narc could very nonchalantly describe how exactly he had managed to “score” with a particular female and what they did together, Trevor – to Narc’s considerable frustration – always remained fairly tight-lipped about his exploits, as if additional disclosure to anyone might make him less chaste and proper.

Nevertheless, the twenty-three-year-olds worked well together as wingmen in a club. Trevor’s redwood perspective in any crowd enabled him quickly to find the part of the club with the greatest potential “play.” He would then nudge Narc, raise his eyebrows with a boyish enthusiasm, and Narc would know that it was time to follow the Tower radar. Once they were within speaking distance of the females in question, the women would ordinarily make some joke amongst themselves about Trevor’s remarkable height, at which point Narc would jump into the conversation with something like, “If you think he looks different, wait until you hear him speak!” This line worked like magic, making the women naturally curious to hear Trevor speak. Trevor would always refuse initially, by bashfully shaking his head, but eventually Narc would say something that would get Trevor speaking. And as soon as the women heard Trevor’s deep voice and disarmingly suave and sophisticated British style of speaking, they became even more intrigued by the pair of tall, exotically handsome men. Narc particularly enjoyed the moment when he and Trevor were asked the inevitable “What do you do?” question, because the answer they gave would only further impress the women, making Narc temporarily value the prestigious education he ordinarily dismissed.